Saturday, July 30, 2016

A Florida man was arrested along with three others last Sunday by a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation officer for allegedly picking hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Little Big Econ State Wildlife Management Area in Seminole County, Florida while also carrying a 2-foot-long alligator in his backpack.

30-year-old Rick Myers, of Titusville, Florida, was charged with possessing an American Alligator without a permit, possessing the psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms that are often referred to as "shrooms" or "magic mushrooms," felony violation of probation, and removing natural resources from a Wildlife Management Area.

Another Brevard County man, 22-year-old Gregory Sansota of Titusville, was also arrested along with Tyler Salzman, age 20 of Deltona, Florida. Both of the young men were charged with possessing the psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms and removing natural resources from a Wildlife Management Area. An unidentified juvenile was among those arrested.

A fourth man fled the scene, but was later arrested by a Seminole County Sheriff's deputy.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has a plan to “guarantee food supply, social justice, and democracy.” As with most of Maduro’s plans, it will accomplish none of those things. Vice News reports:

“A new decree establishing that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work in the country’s fields as a way to fight the current food crisis is unlawful and effectively amounts to forced labor,” Amnesty International said in a statement released on Thursday.
President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree at the end of last week that gives powers to the labor ministry to order “all workers from the public and private sector with enough physical capabilities and technical know-how” to join a government drive aimed at increasing food production.
They can be required to work in the agricultural sector for a 60-day period that can be extended for another 60 days “if the circumstances require it.”

Naturally, Maduro continues to blame the dire circumstances of his country on an economic war brought against him by the Unites States. He’s been saying that for months and even suggesting on occasion that the U.S. was ready to invade.

They should be so lucky. With the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan, we've always left the countries we've "invaded" better than when we came in. Those two exceptions were the deliberate handiwork of Hillary Clinton and Barack H. Obama.

The reality here is much simpler: socialism has been a disaster for Venezuela. The latest attempt at central economic planning is reminiscent of the Soviet Unions five year plans in the 1920s and 1930s. The difference here is that Venezuela is working on 60-day plans because, with inflation already in the triple-digits, it’s hard to imagine how the country could continue for another five years unless something changes.

And a majority of Democrats consider socialism to be a good thing. I suggest all Bernie Bros take a Venezuelan vacation and work in the cane fields.

Judicial Watch today released 294 pages of new Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “302” documents revealing that top Washington IRS officials, including Lois Lerner and Holly Paz, knew that the agency was specifically targeting “Tea Party” and other conservative organizations two full years before disclosing it to Congress and the public. An FBI 302 document contains detailed narratives of FBI agent investigations. The Obama Justice Department and FBI investigations into the Obama IRS scandal resulted in no criminal charges.

The FBI 302 documents confirm the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) 2013 report that said, “Senior IRS officials knew that agents were targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny as early as 2011.” Lerner did not reveal the targeting until May 2013, in response to a planted question at an American Bar Association conference. The new documents reveal that then-acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller actually wrote Lerner’s response: “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.”

The FBI documents also reveal that IRS officials stated that the agency was targeting conservative groups because of their ideology and political affiliation in the summer of 2011. According to one senior tax law specialist, “The case seemed to be pulled because of the applicant’s political affiliation and screening is not supposed to occur that way … [Redacted] said he thought the cases were being pulled based upon political affiliations.” And IRS senior official Nancy Marks, appointed by Miller to conduct an internal investigation stated, “Cincinnati was categorizing cases based on name and ideology, not just activity.”
. . .
According to the FBI documents, Paz and others were informed in the late spring and summer of 2011 that Cincinnati agents were using “BOLO” (Be On the Look Out) briefing guides that instructed them to be “looking at cases using the Tea Party term.” The IRS failed to reveal such targeting until the ABA conference in May 2013 . . .

The computer network used by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hacked as part of a broad cyber attack on Democratic political organizations, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The latest attack, which was disclosed to Reuters on Friday, follows reports of two other hacks on the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, and the party’s fundraising committee for candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.
. . .
The U.S. Department of Justice national security division is investigating whether cyber attacks on Democratic political organizations threatened U.S. security, sources familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The involvement of the Justice Department’s national security division is a sign that the Obama administration has concluded that the hacking was sponsored by a state, people with knowledge of the investigation said.

While I agree that it's likely to have been the Russians (and maybe the Chinese, Iranians, Norks and Israelis too), they seem to be going beyond James Clapper here, who wouldn't conclude that it was the Russians in public. That seems to be part of a media campaign to blame Trump, as if his joking comments three days ago were the cause of hacking that occurred months if not years ago: FBI warned Clinton campaign last spring of cyberattack Like Ace says:

Hillary Clinton‘s comments on her use of a private server during last weekend’s 60 Minutes interview are now being used against her in a FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. For the last several weeks, Judicial Watch has been seeking to depose Clinton about her use of a private email server in order to figure out if Freedom of Information Act requirements were violated.

Judicial Watch says new information was gleaned from an interview with CBS’ Scott Pelley including the fact that Clinton admitted that someone recommended she set up the server. The group wants to know who that someone was. They also contend her statement provides further reasoning for why she must be deposed under oath. Clinton’s lawyers say that issue is irrelevant to the lawsuit.

The last thing Hillary wants to do is testify under oath. There's only one more oath she wants to take, ever.

. . . Her criticisms of Trump might carry weight, except for the fact that an authoritarian, grasping con-artist and looter is calling Trump an authoritarian grifter. One cut of Hillary's seems particularly un-self-aware. She recalled Trump's bluster in saying that he understood ISIS better than generals do. With the only approximation of humor in the speech, she deadpanned "No, Donald, you don't."
. . .
Now let's look at Hillary. Since the 90s, she has pushed one Branding Message to her media allies -- her Sisters in Solidarity -- relentlessly. That Branding Message is that she is, quote, "The Smartest Woman in the World."

She has pushed and pushed and pushed this claim out to her courtiers and haigiographers.

If you're lucky enough to be young, you don't know this. But when conservative deride Hillary, sarcastically, as The Smartest Woman in the World, we're doing that because Hillary cajoled her Distaff Praetorian to pump that out to the world for twenty years or so.

So is Hillary Clinton's complaint that Trump lacks humility, or is her complaint really that Trump has no right to his narcissism, unlike herself and her patron Obama, who clearly deserve to think of themselves as smarter than experts in their fields of specialization?

That might be an overstatement, but close enough. I'll let you be the judge.

Clarke was born in London, and grew up in Berkshire. Her father is a theatre sound engineer. . . Clarke's interest in acting began at the age of three after seeing the musical Show Boat on which her father was working. . . She attended Drama Centre London, and graduated in 2009.

Friday, July 29, 2016

She was off duty and wearing a bikini but that didn’t stop Swedish police officer Mikaela Kellner from catching a suspected thief.

A photo of Kellner pinning the suspect to the ground was trending on social media in Sweden this week.
. . .
Kellner and three friends were sunbathing Wednesday in a Stockholm park, a homeless man selling newspapers approached, she told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

After he left, one friend noticed her phone was missing. Kellner and a fellow police officer gave chase.

Kellner said she didn’t hesitate to make the arrest while wearing a bikini. “If I had been naked I would have intervened as well,” she said.

Contending that the latest plan to fix Baltimore’s leaky sewage system has some big holes in it, Blue Water Baltimore wants a say in the new deal struck between the city and state and federal regulators.

The environmental group filed a motion Wednesday in federal court seeking to intervene in the update of a 14-year-old consent decree that would give the city another 14 years to fix chronic sewage overflows and leaks that have long rendered its harbor and streams unfit for swimming or other human contact.

Halle Van der Gaag, Blue Water Baltimore’s executive director, said the terms of the new decree left her no choice, and her board unanimously agreed to file.

“There’s definitely some improvements (over the old one), but there’s just a whole lot of stuff that’s not in there,” Van der Gaag said.

To settle a federal Clean Water Act lawsuit filed in 2002 by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Maryland Department of the Environment, Baltimore city signed a consent decree pledging to end its frequent sewage overflows by January 2016. But despite spending nearly $900 million since then on repairs, the overflows and leaks continue.

City officials asked regulators for – and received -- more time to pursue more and different upgrades. The additional work, including a major overhaul at the city’s Back River wastewater treatment plant, is expected to cost another $630 million - which city officials say necessitates more increases in utility customer’s sewer bills.

Yep. 14 years is entirely too long to give a city to stop shitting in the waterways. No politician wants to spend money like that during his term in office. It's just too easy to put off.

The reaction of the Democrats and the suddenly-not-Walter Duranty media was classic. Like a teen confronting her dad who is holding the baggie of weed he found in her nightstand, the DNC cried “OMG, I can’t believe you went through my stuff!” before throwing herself sobbing on her bed at the unfairness of it all.

Donald Trump owned the news media on Day Three of Hillary’s Coronation. He even topped President Obama, who gave a wonderful speech that rallied Democrats behind Her Royal Clintoness. Nevertheless, Trump owned the news cycle.
He did so by holding a press conference. The press conference is now his favorite format. He is sharp, funny, spontaneous, and quick on the uptake. As is usually the case, at the press conference he fielded more hostile questions from the media in one hour than Hillary has in her entire pampered, Ivy League, first lady life.

In his role as under secretary for management and resources, Kennedy was the senior official overseeing both diplomatic security during the 2012 attacks in Benghazi and the records and IT departments during “emailgate” — the four-year period when Clinton used a private email server for official business.

This image has gone viral on several different platforms, each one claiming the crab is from a different part of the country. One duplicate post on Imgur claims the crab hails from Florida, but in actuality, the first post that can be found has the crab originating from Maryland.

I, along with Chelsea and Bill, have appointed a new board to manage winding down the Clinton Foundation while I'm president. Its many good works will be continued by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There will be no conflicts of interest, nothing to raise doubts about whether your president is working for you and for you alone.

When you listen to Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech tonight — seriously, America, why? — expect to hear a lot of compassionate talk aimed at working Americans. Specifically, about the Democratic Party’s plans to raise the national minimum wage to $12/hour, force companies to offer paid parental leave, double-down on ObamaCare, expand Medicaid, and push for greater education subsidies.
Then, ask yourself: Are these policies going to make life less or more expensive for Americans?

So this will be the end for a week or so; maybe it will all calm down in a week at the Beach, but I doubt it. I'll try to keep occasional digs in for the duration, but in the meantime, be sure to check out Wombat-socho's more or less daily "In the Mailbox" updates, Larwyn's Linx, also more or less daily, and all the other fine sources in the side bar.

It is understood that two of the men swam onto the nudist beach, while the other four arrived on foot.

When staff intervened and told the men to calm down, they left the beach and instead went to the resort's water ski facility, where they continued to abuse guests.

The incident, which took place on Wednesday, was not reported to German police until the following day.

They are investigating and have interviewed several eyewitnesses.

It comes amid heightened tension between refugees and locals in Germany due to a huge influx of asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan.

It's one thing to molest a thousand or so women in Cologne. It's another entirely to attack their nude beaches. Germans really like their nude beaches. I expect the Germans to start revolting against the government that is forcing them to accept such large numbers of Islamic refugees which are opposed to the values of Germany.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Skye dragged me off to the beach this afternoon. We drove down because the thermometer showed mid 90s. Thunderstorms were building over the Delmarva, but we were spared (although it's raining as I type this).

Cormorants guarding the entrance of the harbor; making sure no edible fish sneak in.

A coalition of environmental groups in Brandywine, Maryland, have filed a federal civil rights complaint against the state for permitting a new gas-fired power plant in a largely African-American community that is already subjected to high levels of pollution. In response, there will be a federal investigation.

“We didn’t think that anybody in their right mind would think that it was okay to add two additional power plants within a 2.9-mile radius, and that’s exactly what was happening.”

I notice they missed Calvert Cliffs Power Plant, the clean nuke located out here in predominantly white Calvert County. Hmm.

The Panda Mattawoman plant — the subject of the investigation — was permitted to be built within view of a second planned power plant. Both will operate just down the road from a third power plant that is currently up and running, and within 15 miles of a fourth and fifth power plant — one under construction, one already online.

If each permitted project lives to see its ribbon-cutting, that would put five power plants within a stone’s throw of Brandywine, a community where seven in 10 residents are African-American.

But it take a hell of an arm to throw one from Brandywine to the Chalk Point Plant out on the Patuxent River, which they're counting in the "statistic."

But let's look at that map again, and consider the population distribution of Maryland (right). I see some similarity here. It turns out that the % black population of Maryland correlates pretty strongly with the population density.

Now there are certain to be many factors involved in power plant siting, but proximity to the population served is certainly part of it. On that basis alone we would expect some substantial number of power plants to be located near predominantly black communities. Add availability materials and a work force (wouldn't want to employ too many of them after all), the cost of land, it's no surprise to see power plants located on the outskirts of population center. No racism involved.

Researchers with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science have found a surprising explanation for the improved water quality in the Chesapeake Bay: cleaner air.

Professor Keith Eshleman (ESH'-el-men) in the center's Frostburg office said in a statement Tuesday that his team found nearly universal improvement in water quality since 1986 across the Upper Potomac River Basin. The area includes parts of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Eshleman says the improvement is mainly due to reduced levels of atmospheric nitrogen dioxides following implementation of the Clean Air Act in 1990. The law limited emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Eshleman says the reductions lowered the amount of excess nitrogen falling across the region and causing algae blooms in waterways.

The claim seems pretty dubious. Direct deposition to the tidal waters is small, and even halving it is not a big contributor. More importantly, forest and non-tidal water atmospheric deposition has actually grown slightly. It looks to me like agriculture and waste water and combined sewage overflow have contributed to the majority of the decrease in nitrogen pollution into the Bay.

The request to investigate the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation on charges of “public corruption” was made in a July 15 letter by 64 House Republicans to the IRS, FBI and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They charged the foundation is “lawless.”
. . .
The lawmakers charged the Clinton Foundation is a “lawless ‘pay-to-play’ enterprise that has been operating under a cloak of philanthropy for years and should be investigated.” . . . House Republicans singled out Laureate Education and Uranium One as two companies that seemed to have paid lavish sums to the Clintons and later received official government benefits.

Now, in truth these boards and commissions are routinely used to reward supporters. Usually, however, that isn’t handled by fundraising staff so as to avoid making it into an explicit quid pro quo. It would be handled as Clinton’s team handled the Fernando appointment, which still wound up embarrassing them. This is as blatant as it gets, and should result in serious probes of the White House’s connection to these pay-for-play fundraising efforts at the DNC. After all, Kaplan had to be sending this data to someone over there to make this scheme work.

The simple fact is that everyone expects husbands to speak well of their wives — even Bill Clinton. That was a box he could have checked in 10 minutes of his speech. Instead, he took the 9,072 minutes of his speech (by my rough estimate) reading Hillary Clinton’s C.V. The biggest problem is that the more he talked the weirder it was that he didn’t address the elephant(s) in the room. This is not a great marriage by any normal person’s definition, unless you measure them almost solely on the metric of political success.
. . .
Oh, and let’s return to the fact that Bill needed to humanize Hillary Clinton. The woman has been in public life for three decades and the highest best use of her former president husband is to spend an entire convention speech trying to convince voters that she’s human.

But, you know, the cheating and the rape accusations and Hillary’s efforts to destroy women who spoke out didn’t really fit his theme for the evening.

Related: Bill Clinton leaves us wondering how he could have been such a louse to Hillary. “Much of America knows how Bill repeatedly cheated on Hillary during the allegedly blissful years he depicted tonight. His cheating isn’t a serious issue in this year’s race, but it provides an unfortunate gloss on his testimony about the marriage. Stated differently, for many Americans, it may have been the 800 pound gorilla in the convention hall. How does one square Bill’s love story with his serial adultery and predatory behavior towards women? It can, perhaps, be done. But only at a psychological level that neither Bill nor Hillary wants us to get anywhere near.”

Whether Clinton meant to or not, he lapsed into Trumpism: the implication that Muslims are a class apart, deserving of special scrutiny and surveillance, guilty of terrorist sympathies until proven innocent.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Hillary Clinton has taken both sides on this issue for as long as she’s been in politics. You’ll recall that Clinton was so “concerned” about protecting the rights of gun owners during her first run at the presidency that Barack Obama referred to her as Annie Oakley. But the political winds have changed a bit since then, and so have Clinton’s deeply held beliefs.

“The senator is not personally for repeal of the Hyde Amendment,” a spokesman for the Clinton-Kaine campaign said Wednesday. He added: “But as he’s made clear, he is committed to carrying out Secretary Clinton’s agenda.”

The grasping socialist government of Venezuela is doing what grasping socialist governments do when things get desperate: accusing the opposition of crimes. Yahoo News reports Nicolas Maduro’s government is actually moving to have the entire opposition party banned because of alleged voter fraud:

The Venezuelan government asked electoral authorities Tuesday to ban the opposition coalition seeking to oust President Nicolas Maduro in a recall vote, accusing them of massive fraud.Ratcheting up the tension in a country pushed to the brink of collapse by an economic crisis, Maduro’s camp hit back with a vengeance on the same day the opposition was hoping to get a green light to go ahead with its bid to hold a recall referendum.“We have just asked for the cancellation of the registration of the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), for being involved in the worst vote fraud in the country’s history,” said Jorge Rodriguez, Maduro’s designated aide to monitor the recall process.

The opposition party has been trying to get the government to approve a referendum on removing Maduro, something which is allowed under the country’s constitution. The first step in that process was collecting enough signatures to start the referendum process. Only 200,000 signatures were required for that initial step and, back in May, the opposition party turned in 1.8 million signatures, way more than what was required.

Yahoo News reports the socialists in power are now claiming to have found 11,000 signatures which they claim belong to dead people, children or convicts. The opposition disputes this but even if it’s true what about the other 1,789,000 signatures? Are all of those invalid too? Based on a claim to have invalidated a tiny fraction of the signatures the socialists are attempting to ban the entire opposition party.

Given their busted attempts to railroad Ted Stevens, Rick Perry, Tom Delay and Bob McDonnell out of office and into jail, can anyone doubt that the socialists democrats are willing to try similar stunts in our country?

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

A new Union of Concerned Scientists study evaluated the risks of climate-induced inundation at a sample of 18 military bases on the East and Gulf of Mexico coasts. Five are in the Bay’s tidal regions.

Well, here's your first problem. The Union of Concerned Scientists have been a reliable purveyor of propaganda and an unreliable source of science since the '60s when they set out on their crusade to unilaterally disarm the United States nuclear program in the midst of the Cold War.

Between shifts in land and sea, the naval base at Hampton Roads could experience rising waters of as much as two feet by 2050 and 6.9 feet by 2100, the union projects. And in a category 1 hurricane, the weakest, the storm surge could wash over a quarter of the base by 2050, up from roughly a tenth today, according to the study.

The report suggests that the Pentagon ought to be preparing its installations to deal with the highest sea level rise projections because risk reduction is a top priority for military assets.

A Navy official said the service is responding. Brian Ballard, Navy Region Mid-Atlantic community plans liaison, said Naval Station Norfolk is raising the height of existing piers and retrofitting them with double decks, to make it easier to access utilities and reduce damage inflicted during “heavy weather.”

The Navy is incorporating climate change impacts in all its installation master plans, Ballard said, and the Defense Department is updating its building codes for new construction and renovation to reflect the risks.

However, the Pentagon’s sea level rise projections are significantly lower than those in the UCS study. The DoD forecasts rising seas ranging between one-quarter inch and one inch by 2050 at Naval Station Norfolk. Ballard declined to comment on the UCS projection that sea level could rise 1.4 feet to 2.0 feet by 2050.

Here's the truth of sea level rise in the Chesapeake Bay region. Right around 3 mm per year (including settling), with evidence for an increase in the rate in the "warming" (post 1950s) era. To get to 1.4 - 2 feet by 2050 would require a nearly catastrophic increase, that no real mechanism exists to provide.

That difference notwithstanding, Naval Station Norfolk does have tidal gates and other protections against storms that UCS did not factor into its study. For the longer term, Ballard said the Navy is not planning to install massive sea walls and gates akin to those used in the Netherlands, but has not ruled out any protective measure. The potential cost of adaptations cannot be estimated today, but whatever the enormous investment, it could be spread over time as infrastructure is repaired and rebuilt, Ballard noted.

And the answer, if it occurs, is relatively simple. Raise the level of the land by adding fill. and raise the buildings. For runways, ordinary repaving probably matches sea level rise. Look what's occurred with Manhattan Island since it was settled by Europeans. Despite rising sea level, Manhattan has continued to expand. People will protect land that is valuable to them.

Prosecutors dropped all remaining charges against three Baltimore police officers accused in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in a downtown courtroom on Wednesday morning, concluding one of the most high-profile criminal cases in Baltimore history.

The startling move was an apparent acknowledgement of the unlikelihood of a conviction following the acquittals of three other officers on similar and more serious charges by Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams, who was expected to preside over the remaining trials as well.

It also means the office of Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby will secure no convictions in the case after more than a year of dogged fighting, against increasingly heavy odds, to hold someone criminally accountable in Gray's death.

Officer William Porter's trial ended with a hung jury and a mistrial in December, before Williams acquitted Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson and Lt. Brian Rice at bench trials in May, June, and July, respectively.

In a hearing Wednesday meant to start the trial of Officer Garrett Miller, Chief Deputy State's Attorney Michael Schatzow told Williams that the state was dropping all charges against Miller, Porter and Sgt. Alicia White.

I would venture to guess that this is the beginning of the end of Marilyn Mosby's political career, unless the Clinton administration moves her to the Justice Department to continue her war on the police.

I would also suggest that we'll never find out what really happened to Freddy Gray. There are just too many partial witness, all with agendas, so no coherent story will ever emerge.

If Trump wins the presidency, there will be a lot of reasons, and a lot of blame to go around. But one factor, and some-much deserved blame, will be the decision to anoint Clinton as the candidate long before the primary had even started. I don’t blame Clinton for this, because upwardly mobile politicians like her all think they have what it takes to become president, and they do their utmost to get themselves into that coveted job. But there were a lot of people who ought to have known better. Either they didn't, or they didn’t act on that knowledge. If Clinton doesn’t manage to pull this out, that decision will haunt them for years to come.